Login

As legislators work feverishly to wrap-up the state budget, Raleigh’s News & Observer takes the leadership to task in Friday’s must-read editorial that describes this session as shortsighted, based on the “politics of revenge and destruction.” Here’s an excerpt:

When they got control of the General Assembly, Republicans vowed to drive North Carolina in a new and better direction. Instead, they’re behind the wheel in a demolition derby.

As The News & Observer’s Rob Christensen reported, GOP leaders on Jones Street are in the process of dismantling every positive Democratic-sponsored program or legislation they can get their hands on. And as result, everyone from public school teachers to families on Medicaid to the scientists at the innovative N.C. Biotechnology Center are going to feel the consequences, some of them very bad consequences indeed, from the Republican knives.

Some of the actions are clearly ideological and partisan: abolition of the Racial Justice Act, for one example. But other actions that have been taken or are under negotiation smack of political immaturity. They’re just about doing away with anything the Democrats did in the way of innovative or helpful programs just because…the Democrats did it.

Consider: The legendary Gov. Kerr Scott, “the squire of Haw River,” expanded state unemployment benefits from 20 to 26 weeks in 1951. The benefits are practical as well as humane, because they keep money in the state economy. Republicans are cutting the benefits to a sliding scale of between 12 and 20 weeks. (They’ve also cut the maximum benefit and lost an opportunity to extend federal benefits to the long-term unemployed at no cost to the state.)

Hurting people

Or: The Child Fatality Task Force was created by the legislature under Republican Gov. Jim Martin in 1991 to aim at reducing infant and child deaths. The rate has dropped dramatically. The House wants to end it.

And in the area of enlightened actions to give the public more participation in political financing, Democrats in the legislature in 1977 allowed taxpayers a voluntary check-off on their tax forms to give $3 to a fund to help political parties, and in 2002 created a public financing system for high-level judicial races. They also in 2007 allowed public financing, through a voluntary tax check-off, for Council of State offices of treasurer, insurance commissioner and superintendent of public instruction. Republicans aim to end them all.

These types of actions will hurt people, pure and simple. They’re destructive and shortsighted and hardly worthy of a state that has long prided itself in being ahead of other states in the Deep South, a part of what once was called the “New South,” a place that had overcome narrow-minded leadership driven by take-no-prisoners ideology.

So much for that.

The tea party element of the Republican Party that now seems to have legislative GOP leaders scared to death is all about the politics of revenge and destruction. What’s their cheer? “Push us back, push us back, way back…”

Do they get it?

Some actions are simply astonishing, including a debate centered on tax cuts and reform that’s so utterly confusing that some of the supporters of it don’t even seem to understand it. It’s at a point where the outcome is liable to be a tax break for business and the wealthy that will blow a hole in the budget, one that presumably will be closed on the backs of the middle class.

3 Comments

Phil Burton

June 21, 2013 at 8:24 am

Republicans got part of their goal right. They have taken us in a new direction. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong direction unless you’re a multimillionaire and send your kids to private church-sponsored schools. The rest of us are not going to see the “better direction” unfortunately. We just get to pay the bill to subsidize the millionaires who refuse to pay their fair share.

Heather

June 21, 2013 at 11:52 am

What’s simply horrid is that, in fact, an overwhelming number of people vote these beasts into office, share in their belief system of psychopathic, narcissistic greed, racism, disdain for the poor. Many of these people suffer delusions of being some sort of, what, Christians of the devil? You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

Frances Jenkins

June 22, 2013 at 7:56 am

They were elected to dismantle the welfare state created by corrupt Democrats.
Heather take some pills and calm down, it will be okay.